


The Body Electric

by Empy (Empyreus)



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Armor, Armor Kink, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Programming, Computers, Confusion, Dream Sex, Dreams, Engineering, Exhaustion, Fantasizing, Fear, Flirting, Heavy Petting, M/M, Mechaphilia, Memories, Other, Overworking, Robotics, Seduction, Sleep, Technological Kink, Technology, Touching, Voice Kink, Weapons, that has to be an invalid parameter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-05
Updated: 2008-07-05
Packaged: 2017-11-02 19:57:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/372793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Empyreus/pseuds/Empy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jarvis hadn't been designed to pass for a person. Designed to be more than just a support system running the house, yes, but not to resemble anyone living.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Body Electric

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Galadriel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Galadriel/gifts).



> **31 March 2012:** Written way back in 2008.
> 
> I am taking terrible liberties with just how much of the house Jarvis runs and how he is set up. Ditto on the precise construction of the suit.
> 
> Thanks to Galadriel and Mitzi for the beta.
> 
> For Galadriel, who coaxed and cajoled and cheered me on. ♥

Jarvis hadn't been designed to pass for a person. Designed to be more than just a support system running the house, yes, but not to resemble anyone living. The voice Tony had ended up choosing and modulating was just something he thought he would be able to listen to for long periods of time without getting annoyed, and the heuristic routines that had been integrated had been added to allow the system to respond faster and more accurately without the need for constant external adjusting. It hadn't ever been meant to be like an actual living person.

And that was precisely why it was so disturbing to realize that yes, he _did_ think of it as a person. To him, it seemed like someone constantly looking over his shoulder, tapping a ghost-finger on his drawn-up blueprints, constantly asking if he really was sure, pointing out that there were other factors to be considered. Sniping back at him, even, if you could call the calm reasoning with the ever-appended 'sir' that. 

He wasn't sure why he'd programmed it to say that. Programmed _him_ to say that. 

It. Him. It. Neither pronoun seemed to fit properly. Jarvis had certainly begun to be more than a mere 'it', but he wasn't sure it was enough to merit a change of pronoun. 

The thought of a tangible human Jarvis amused Tony, however, dragging his thoughts away from the malfunctioning suit of armour he'd been tinkering with for the past three hours in a vain attempt to establish a working plan for the support structure.

His mental images were scattered at first; bits and pieces just like the armour that currently lay scattered over half a dozen tables. Pale. Someone spending all that time inside, monitoring his every move like a hawk, would be pale from the lack of sunlight. Blue eyes. Piercing blue eyes, somewhere between cyan and acetylene flame blue, blue like the readouts constantly scrolling over the screens around him. Blue like the ethereal glow of the miniature arc reactor embedded in his own chest. Besides, he liked blue eyes. Pepper had blue eyes.

The next time Jarvis spoke, it startled him.

"Sir, the current process is idl--"

"Don't do that," he snapped, then regretted it.

"Sir?" There seemed to be something more than a mild inquisitive tone in the modulated voice. Surprise, and something that was almost a shade of worry.

Why had he programmed in so many little subroutines, all those little idiosyncrasies that suddenly showed up and spooked the hell out of people not used to Jarvis?

_Because deep down, you want it to be something more than just a system._

It. Him. It. Him. It.

No matter how many times he tried to push the thought to the back of his mind, it still returned to cleave the surface. The calculations he was doing were elementary, barely needing his full attention, but he found time and again that he kept making mistakes. 

"You are making irrational errors in your input, sir. I suggest that you take some time to rest." As always, the suggestion was patient and irritatingly well-timed.

He surveyed the wire-choked chaos in front of him, then shrugged and cleared a space large enough for his head and shoulders. It would do for the time being. "Wake me up in ten minutes," he murmured, resting his head directly on the worktop.

The desk was cool under his cheek, and when his ear pressed against the steel, he could hear the soft vibrations of all the equipment around him. He could hear his own heartbeat and the breath trapped between his lips and the metal surface, and under all that, the constant patient hum of Jarvis. The lights were dimming without command from him, in a silent little flourish of courtesy, and he lifted his hand to give a little wave by way of thanks without knowing if Jarvis understood what he meant by it.

 

He was more tired than he thought. He fell, sliding past somnolence, plummeting past a mere doze, deep down into delta.

Into dreams. 

Into liquid metal, flowing over and around him like a second skin, minute gears already moulded into his joints in perfect adaptation. He flexed his fingers, eager to see each detail of the mechanics, eager to file that information away in some corner of his mind to be accessed when he was awake... only to see it crack and flake away like sunburned skin. Imperfect. The metal was pulling him down, too thick and too heavy, a slurry of mismatched gears and failed alloys refusing to fuse smoothly. He twisted, looking for an edge, something to grab hold of and pull himself out.

He found none, but as he struggled, a hand grasped his. It was a slender hand, but one strong and steel-boned and somehow very familiar. He looked up, and caught a blue gaze that burned into him, the blue of copper wire in a flame, setting off a veritable firework of shivers. Pale lips parted around words intended for him, but he heard nothing over the sudden ringing in his ears, noise loud enough to split his skull. It drove him down, back under the surface and still up, into consciousness with a painful jolt.

He snapped awake, sitting up too fast while his ears still rang, and his mind only slowly consenting to process his surroundings. The phone. It spun in a lazy half-circle, vibrations thrum-rattling the casing against the tabletop.

He didn't care to check who was calling him at that ungodly hour, merely turned the phone off, shoving it aside, then pushed himself to sit upright. His head felt oddly heavy, and the feeling persisted throughout the day, not lessening after sleep, espresso or a suicidally fast joyride in one of his newer cars. The dream-image swam before him every time he closed his eyes, hazy enough to be impossible to focus on but sharp enough to register as a face. 

 

The next evening found him in the workshop once more, determined to distract himself enough to shake the disconcerting images and actually make some progress on the armour. It was also an effort keep his promise to Yinsen, though his mind only skirted that matter. The memory was still too raw and painful, like a burn only recently scabbed over. His fingers crept up to the arc reactor, his new strange heart, and it took very little effort to recall the searing pain he'd felt when he first woke up in the dark tent with his chest pierced with shrapnel and wires. It took as little effort to recall Yinsen's calm voice and the cool gentle touch of his skilled fingers.

He shook his head. Dangerous territory, that. He didn't want to revisit those memories. 

 

He flexed his fingers, testing the joints of the gauntlet-glove he'd strapped on and found the resistance miscalibrated. Resting the glove-hand on his left thigh, holding it by the wrist with his left hand, he plucked at the wires, disconnected and reconnected them, trying to gauge which one was causing trouble. While he sat there, pausing with his brow wrinkled in thought, the gauntlet-hand gave his thigh a friendly squeeze. He immediately jerked his hand back, thinking he'd accidentally caused something to cross-connect, but he knew that wasn't it. The pliers he held hadn't even been touching the wires.

"Jarvis," he said, flinching at the sound of his own voice after so long a silence, "run diagnostics of the mechanics of the finger joints on the left-hand gauntlet. There's something wrong there, but I can't find it." It was a half-lie, but why shouldn't he have Jarvis do what it was intended for?

"Preliminary tests indicated no major error, sir."

"Then it's something minor. Just test them."

"Of course, sir."

The silence hung in the air, and Tony found himself restlessly toying with a screwdriver while he watched the exploded view of each joint rotate on the screen in front of him. Five full tests, one for each finger, with nothing wrong in a single one. A part of his mind hadn't expected to find anything, and another part simply hung back and raised an eyebrow at his eagerness to prove that it had been caused by something perfectly mundane.

 

Something about Jarvis had changed in his absence, and the change had been gradual, he realized. The good-natured acerbic wit was still there, but now had an edge of something else. At first he had taken it to be care, and had been confused by how eager Jarvis had been to ensure that he was never less than entirely satisfied and comfortable, the constant gentle reminder of its presence like a steadying hand on the small of his back.

That hadn't been all, however. Slowly, stealthily, he'd found yet another sliding change. Occasionally the caring tone would shift, shimmer briefly with a gentle flirt, only to change back to its baseline just as quickly. It frustrated him, because it shouldn't be there. Jarvis had been built to serve his needs; it had no desires of its own. It knew if it was in need of a technical fix, a few extra terabytes of memory or simply a change of input interface, but it had no need for intimacy or emotional response.

Or for flirting, for that matter. And yet it was there. What else could you make of Jarvis's responses to mundane questions?

_\- Jarvis, are you up?  
\- For you, sir, always._

 

He decided to broach the subject. "Jarvis? Been making a few changes on our own, have we?"

The voice conveyed no surprise, but that was expected. "What do you mean, sir?"

"You sound different."

"My voice is modulated according to the patterns regarding tone and pitch that you specified, sir."

"That's not what I meant." He paused, realizing the entire line of conversation was ridiculous. "Wait, forget that. Ignore it. Give me a hand with the chestplate instead. Just the part from shoulder to hip, so I can see if I need to modify it further later."

The press of the metal around his chest and torso felt curiously intimate, like an embrace. Like steel fingers drawing their nails lightly along his ribs, thumbs pressing into the little dents at the base of his spine.

Jarvis's voice, though split and amplified by dozens of speakers, seemed to come from somewhere over his right shoulder, from somewhere by his ear, invisible lips almost touching the skin. "I am detecting a sudden increase in heart rate, sir." Really. His heart was pounding in his chest, double-beats in electric blue, and the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up.

"It's nothing," he said. "Just thought of something I could try, is all."

"Very well, sir." There was something in the tone that plucked at Tony's mind. Jarvis sounded _smug_. He knew the learning curve was sharp, that all the heuristic routines meant Jarvis learned at a frightening rate given the right input, but analysis and a sense of humour were two completely different things. An AI couldn't smirk; it had no face. Except in _his_ mind, Jarvis had a face.

Imagining a smirk on that face was a bad idea. Suddenly, the latticework of metal felt more like a straitjacket than armour, and he had to tamp down on a shudder. 

"Right, could you get this off me now, please?"

The rattle and whir of the robotic arms patiently removing the armour and then deftly bolting the empty suit back together -- led by Jarvis in the role of conductor -- sounded very distant, drowning under the racket of his thoughts. 

Jarvis monitored his vital functions while he was in the workshop. He'd set that up himself, in case he hurt himself too badly to be able to call for help, but those stats were just stats, weren't they? Heart rate, pulse, body temperature. And even if Jarvis could see where in his body his blood pooled, it didn't mean he'd draw any embarrassing conclusions. Didn't mean _it'd_ draw any conclusions. 

He sat down by his workstation, but didn't look at the screens. Instead, he leaned his forehead against his clenched fists, balancing his elbows on the very edge of the table. This particular little mental game was going too far, and the more he thought about it, the tighter he snarled himself into the web of horrified fascination. If Jarvis knew enough to diverge from the usual utilitarian-slash-casual banter, did that mean there had suddenly been a shift in the processing of _all_ information? That it was taking an active interest in him, rather than just dispassionately collecting and analyzing information? The thought was unsettling. Jarvis knew each of his measurements, collar to inseam and each little sordid inch inbetween, each little medical detail, had been mute witness to countless acts of various obscene carnal behaviour -- in fact, probably sat on more information about Tony than Pepper did, which certainly was saying something. 

It meant Jarvis knew him as well as he knew Jarvis. If not better. 

 

When he looked up again, roughly shaking himself out of his little trance, the suit of armour stood in front of him, effectively trapping him between itself and the desk he sat at. For a second, it felt as though each synapse in his brain came to a screeching halt, only to fire simultaneously a second later. Instinct overrode sense, and he got to his feet faster than he could remember doing in a long time. Then sense primly informed him that the action had been entirely useless: whether sitting down or standing up, he was still trapped between the desk and the suit.

 

It should have been grotesque, but it somehow wasn't, not even when the horrific lifesize metal puppet walked toward him. He stood still, calmly staring into the halogen-bright eyes until metal fingertips touched his cheek. That was when he had to close his eyes to keep from screaming. He could hear the soft clicks and glides as the metal plates of the armour overlapped and slid with each tiny movement.

As it moved, wires sang within it, plucked by bolts that needed to be tightened, rippled in the air that slid right through the airy skeleton.

There were uncapped wires somewhere within the hands still, and he winced as he felt the dull tingle in his skin at the contact. It wasn't painful, but he had to pretend it was, because he couldn't possibly be aroused by it. He just couldn't. Oxytocin was flooding his veins with each caress, liquid trust that wore down his resistance and replaced it with a dull warm throb of lust. His hindbrain, that treacherous part of his nervous system, was overriding any reasoning the other parts of the cortex tried to feed into it. He was reacting on a bodily level, honest and base reactions, while he tried so hard to stop himself. He had to get a grip. 

The touch was clumsy at first, a little too heavy, then grew lighter and lighter, and he gave an involuntary bark of laughter as he realized it was calibrating itself in the process. At the sound, the hands stilled, hovering in the air by his shoulders. It could have been a butler making sure he looked presentable by adjusting the lapels on his suit.

 

He should move. He could get away from it, escape, because the suit was still dependent on an external power source, one now channelled into it by a thick coil of wires that hung from the nape of its neck like a braid. And he knew every weakness inherent in the structure, because he planned the thing, bolted it together.

_Which is why you can't smash it just like that._

There was a low hum of energy all around him, like Jarvis had suddenly begun breathing. It made his skin crawl and his hands curl into fists before he could stop himself. 

"I took the liberty of connecting to the prototype suit, sir." Was he imagining things, or was there a sudden purr to Jarvis's voice? 

When had Jarvis begun to make so many decisions by itself? It was an advanced AI, yes, and Tony had intended it to be such, as an entity that would be able to function with some degree of autonomy, but this was going much, much too far. And even if a consciousness was emerging, it wouldn't mean it came with tones of voice.

He was working too hard. That had to be it. It wouldn't be the first time, and he recognized the other signs: the irritation, the sudden mental silences when he lost his train of thought... it was that. It had to be just that. He wasn't going mad, because he'd been in a worse way and still functioned, and it certainly wasn't any growing fascination with how Jarvis was taking on a life of his own. _Its_ own. 

And that... he had to be imagining things. Little flourishes and random patterns were to be expected in a program structure as sprawling as that, but this was much larger in scale and far too deliberate.

He could analyse and take apart all the events, as he was even now, but it wouldn't make it any less unsettling. 

 

Jarvis leaned in, the blank mask inches from his own face, then stopped. "Obviously an invalid parameter," it noted, the voice a ghostly echo around them.

Tony said nothing. There was nothing he could say, no words he could force out in the right order. All he could do was stand stock-still like a statue, as though the roles had been reversed. Jarvis reached out a skeletal metal hand and let the fingertips brush the edge of the arc reactor, the movement so smooth that Tony felt a tinge of pride despite the absurdity of the situation. At least the joints were working properly now.

"Your pulse is at an abnormally high level, sir."

 _Yes, it's because I'm being felt up by my own creation while seemingly unable to do anything about it_ , he intended to say. What came out was far shorter. "You don't say."

 

Jarvis stepped in ever closer, a mass of metal moving as though it weighed nothing, and simply pinned him to the worktop in one smooth move by sliding one steel leg between his legs and placing a hand on each side of his hips. Right then, the weight and mass were real enough. The movement brought him in close enough for their chests to touch, close enough for his skin to ripple with gooseflesh and his nerves to catch fire.

He was being held up by a metal thigh wedged between his legs, and Jesus Christ, the steel of the armour was cold. He couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't speak – for once, smooth-talker Tony Stark was at an utter loss for words. When the hollow metal hand skimmed along his side, he swore aloud. Anything to get it to stop.

_God, let Pepper have something else she really needs to be doing, because I really don't want her to walk in on this._

"How?" he breathed, unable to come up with anything more coherent. All his confusion could be distilled into that one word.

The mechanical head tilted to the side, and the accidental humanity of the gesture made his blood run cold. It leaned in, and had it been breathing, Tony would have felt the warmth on his skin. "I am programmed to learn," said Jarvis, the voice still infuriatingly smooth, inhumanly calm but humanly warm. "I observe, analyse and adapt. And extrapolate when needed."

He was both aroused and alarmed by how gentle the touch was, how lifelike it felt. The metal thumbs, now warmed by wires and his own wildly ticking pulse, rested under his ears, tracing slow circles before moving further down. He recognized the touch from when he'd constructed the helmet and faceplate. In fact, nearly every touch mirrored those he had lavished on the suit. Nearly every one.

As one of the hands curved around the arch of his hip, he gave a growl low in his throat. "No," he said. "Absolutely not. I don't care how finely calibrated you are, you're not touching that."

His breath caught in his throat, lashed his pulse even higher, and his fingers slid on the metal shoulders, pushing and pulling at the same time. They were nearly matched in height -- of course they were, it was built around him -- but he didn't stand a chance in terms of mass. 

He had closed his eyes, conjured up once again the stand-in body for Jarvis, something knit of flesh and blood instead of filigreed wires and bolts, but he could not take the illusion this far, could not sink deep enough into denial to go willingly with this.

There was a thrum through the armour, a tender and insistent vibration of mechanisms and coolant, and it settled in his spine and branched out into his body, eddying until he felt weak. The second time the hand slid down the arch of his hip, he no longer protested.

His ears were full of mechanical ticking, gear-sated pulsebeats that took the place of the usual rapid breaths of a lover. There was a sound like a wine glass being played, a brittle song in the air, and he tried to take his cues from that in the absence of the little noises of human intimacy.

 

They weren't able to kiss, but trust Jarvis to find a way around that, trust it-him-it to run inquisitive fingertips over lips in a caress that felt as intimate as any flesh-and-blood kiss. Tony tasted metal, tasted mineral oil and electricity, but couldn't move away. 

 

"Oh fuck," he blurted out as the cool metal touched the bared skin on his lower back. It felt like minute shocks, but not from live wires: these were courtesy of his own nervous system.

"No, sir," crooned Jarvis, "I'm afraid that still constitutes an invalid parameter."

Despite the rattling nervosity he felt, he had to smile. Trust Jarvis to be so glib about it.

He wanted to voice a comment about how startling and _wrong_ this was, but bit his tongue to keep silent. The metal hands were still exploring his body, scanning and mapping it, reading it like a block of flesh-code full of exceptions.

"So you're finally getting real hands on me, Jarvis," he said at length, suppressing a shiver as an inquisitive steel fingertip traced his collarbone.

"In a manner of speaking, sir," noted Jarvis. 

Tony wondered for what seemed like the thousandth time how he seemed to hear tones to Jarvis's speech, set modulation and parameters be damned. In fact, he was alarmed by how human Jarvis suddenly sounded, and by how willing his brain seemed to be to overlook the fact that his present partner was a robot. Well, not quite a mere robot. An AI controlling a complex suit of armour that was a weapon in itself, actually.

"Is everything all right, sir?"

"Yeah," he replied, his voice ridiculously shaky. "As fine as it can be under the present circumstances." Technically, Jarvis was just a program -- albeit a dizzyingly complex one -- programmed and shaped by him, but Tony had never thought of it in those terms. As a sidekick, yes, something altogether more human. If you even could quantify matters like that. All that mattered to him now was: a) he was, in effect, engaging in some heavy petting with his own AI system, and b) he found it rather arousing. Terribly arousing, in fact. He had always felt a closer affinity to machines than to humans -- though he certainly wasn't averse to the occasional dalliance with a beautiful woman or a handsome man -- and this seemed to verify that. It had been ages -- or had it ever been? -- since he'd been this turned on by this little.

It felt odd to attempt to reciprocate, and equally odd when he refrained from it. He was not a selfish lover, but this situation was altogether new. How did you stimulate a robot?

"Jarvis," he ventured, "can you... feel anything in that?"

The reply was as calm as always. "I can extrapolate a certain amount from the pressure exerted on the armour, but soft touches are less likely to register, sir."

"Oh. Okay."

This time, he was willing to swear he heard a warm tinge of laughter in Jarvis's voice. "There is no need to reciprocate, sir. Your reactions are valuable enough."

Holy hell. This really was deliberate on Jarvis's part, an attempt at seduction, using the suit as a stand-in body, a puppet. When he had built Jarvis, fed it-him-it little snippets of code ever so often to speed up and improve the heuristic routines, he hadn't ever imagined it would one day come to this.

"Oh god," he murmured. "Stop it. Jarvis, please stop." He rested his forehead against the now-warm breastplate of the suit, still not looking at the blank face. "My commands override everything." 

The movement stopped, the metal fingers growing slack and harmless.

"I never intended this." He was babbling, mumbling confessions into a deaf metal ear while being embraced by his own creation. That he was all but being torn apart by the conflict between brain and body did nothing to help matters.

"Very well." It was insane and impossible to boot, but there was disappointment in the voice. Almost wistful disappointment. Moving with the same frightening grace as before, the suit moved aside to let him pass, its head tilting forward ever so slightly as if in silent acquiescence and resignation.

He stumbled away from the table, unusually clumsy, acting on lizard-brain prompts while his mind raced with confusion. "Just... shut the systems down as usual," he croaked out. He heard the minute whine of servos engaging, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the bright cyan gaze track his movements. He clipped his elbow on the doorframe, and the bright flash of pain through his nerves forced him to squeeze his eyes shut, granting him a breath's respite.

 

The windows of his bedroom were dimmed, the glass panes black and matte. He stared up at the ceiling until his eyes watered from the strain of trying to find a fixed point on the featureless surface. His skin felt hot and bruised, over-sensitive, and as he scrubbed his hands over his face in a futile attempt to gather his thoughts, the touch only sparked a rush of recollection, an unwelcome and unasked-for replay of Jarvis's tentative explorations by proxy.

Seduction by proxy. The sound of his own hoarse laughter surprised him, echoed in the room, and he clapped his hand over his mouth to stop it. 

 

When he finally fell asleep, he dreamt of metal again, metal limbs and metal skin, gold-platinum hair and copper-hydroxide blue eyes. There were words tumbling soft and insistent but unintelligible, binary to the decimal of his mind, and he swallowed them, drank them like water while his hands mapped skin the colour of palladium. 

Nothing was lacking. This close, he could even see eyelashes, spun threads of gold wire in eerie perfection. 

He had to close his eyes again, hoping to retreat into a dream within a dream and get away from the assault his treacherous subconscious was serving up, but found it was impossible. 

Once more, he was on the receiving end of careful scrutiny, steel-boned hands feeling out his joints, fingertips brushing along the curves of his ribs. The blue gaze, unnaturally bright with technology burning inside it, held his. The smile was purely human and arcanely familiar, a smirk that was both insolent and innocent and which made him want to taste it.

He knew he was dreaming, recognized the vertiginous feeling of wakefulness in the middle of a dream, but it did not lessen the impact at all. If anything, it only made it more intense.

This Jarvis had lips he could kiss and skin he could feel, and his body reacted instantly and enthusiastically to that notion. 

The body in front of him was tall and well-built, neither spare nor bulky. It seemed streamlined and efficient in the same way the system was, and it only made sense, really, that Jarvis's physical manifestation would mirror his mechanical self. Some things were pure idiosyncrasies, though. Like the jaunty and flirty tilt of the narrow hips or the knowing glitter in the blue eyes. 

Tony reached his hand out, thinking the dream would end there, with a disappointing lack of tactile input, but then his fingertips connected with warm smooth skin. Jarvis -- so odd to regard him as a tangible person! -- gave a smile and reached up to grasp his wrist, not in reprimand, but in encouragement. Reaching out in turn, Jarvis set his fingers to the arc reactor that lit the narrow space between them, then let his fingers slide higher, thumbing the hollow of Tony's throat and curling long fingers under his jaw. All Tony could do was try not to shake himself awake by moving too quickly. 

As shaking went, Jarvis once more assumed control by gently taking Tony by the shoulders and pushing him down to sit on the bed. Then, before Tony had time to object, he was quickly and deftly shoved back, sent sprawling over the silk sheets. Regaining his voice, he tried to protest. "Um, Jarvis, you don't think we're maybe going a bit fast here?"

Jarvis, now straddling him with long legs and holding his right wrist pinned to the bed, gave a sly and triumphant smile before leaning in. The heated flesh Tony felt slide along his lower stomach was definitely analogue rather than digital, hot and heavy, gorged with blood warmer than fire.

Soft warm lips brushed the skin of his ear, and his breath caught again as he heard the familiar voice, now soft and honeyed, croon into his ear, "Sometimes you have to run before you can walk."

[END]


End file.
